Dr. M. C. Egbert retained his share. Riches showered upon him. His interests in the land and wells yielded him thousands of dollars a day. Once his safe contained, by tight squeezing, eighteen-hundred-thousand dollars in currency and a pile of government bonds! He built a comfortable house and lived on the farm. He and his family traveled over Europe, met shoals of titled folks and saw all the sights. In company with John Brown, subsequently manager of a big corporation at Bradford and now a resident of Chicago, he engaged in oil-shipments on an extensive scale. To control this branch of the trade, as the Standard Oil-Company has since done by combinations of capital, was too gigantic a task for the firm and failure resulted. The brainy, courageous doctor went to California, returned to Oildom and operated in McKean county. He has secured a foothold in the newer fields and lives in Pittsburg, frank and urbane as in the palmiest days of the Hyde & Egbert farm. If Dame Fortune was strangely capricious on Oil Creek, the pluck of the men with whom “the fickle jade” played whirligig was surely admirable. Probably no parcel of ground in America of equal size ever yielded a larger return, in proportion to the expenditure, than the Hyde & Egbert tract. Six weeks’ production of the Coquette or Maple Shade would drill all the wells on the property. Charles Hyde and Dr. A. G. Egbert cleared at least three-million dollars, the latter selling one-twelfth of the Coquette alone for a quarter-million cash. Profits of others interested in the land and of the lessees trebled this alluring sum. The aggregate—eight to ten millions—in silver-dollars would load a freight-train or build a column twenty miles high! Fused into a lump of gold, a dozen mules might well decline the task of drawing it a mile. Done up into a bundle of five-dollar bills, Hercules couldn’t budge the bulky package. A “promoter” of the Mulberry-Sellers brand wanted an owner of the farm, when the wells were at their best, to launch the whole thing into a stock-company with five-millions capital. “Bah!” responded the gentleman, “five millions—did you say five-millions? Don’t waste your breath talking until you can come around with twenty-five millions!”